Month: December 2012

Sunbury Press has released “Polar City Dreaming:How Climate Change Might Usher In The Age Of Polar Cities” by Stephan Malone. Danny Bloom contributed the introduction. Artist Victoria Goodman created the cover artwork.

About the book:
Stephan Malone has written a book that, if you read it carefully, will change your life and the way you look at the future. Read it in that spirit, and remember that life in so-called “polar cities”arrayed around the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in a greenhouse-warmed world is coming down the road in the distant future.

Not now, not yet. But soon. A hundred years? Three hundred years? Five hundred years. ”Soon!” (scare quotes mine). James Lovelock, who in 1972 conceived of Earth’s crust, climate and veneer of life as a unified self-sustaining entity, Gaia, foresees humanity in full pole-bound retreat within the next 500 to 1,000 years as areas around the tropics roast — a scenario far outside even the worst-case projections of climate scientists. Lovelock is serious, I am serious and Stephan Malone’s book is serious, too. Read it and weep for humankind. But also read it as a guide to taking action so that this nightmare scenario never has to happen.

In 2007, I began setting Web sites showing designs by Taiwanese artist Deng Cheng-hong for self-sufficient Arctic communities. My intent was to conduct mere a ”thought experiment” that might prod people out of their comfort zones on climate — which remains, for many, even today, a someday, somewhere issue. “At six going on eight billion people,” Lovelock told the New York Times in an interview in 2006, “the idea of any further development is almost obscene. We’ve got to learn how to retreat from the world that we’re in. Planning a good retreat is always a good measure of generalship.” The retreat, Lovelock insisted, even then, would be toward the poles. Enter the concept of “polar cities” for survivors of global warming and climate chaos in some far distant future, at least 30 generations from now, if not more. Of course, it sounds like a dubious scenario, But there is already an intensifying push to develop Arctic resources and test shipping routes that could soon become practical should the floating sea ice in the Arctic routinely vanish in future summers.

Sensing this shift, the U.S. Coast Guard has already proposed establishing its first permanent Arctic presence, a helicopter station in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the United States. It’s not a stretch to think of Barrow as a hub for expanding commercial fishing and trade through the Bering Strait. The strategic significance of an ”opening Arctic” recently was described in an article by Scott Borgerson, a former Coast Guard officer who is now a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is no longer a matter of if, but when, the Arctic Ocean will open to regular marine transportation and exploration of its lucrative natural-resource deposits,” he wrote. While he didn’t mention polar cities per se, it’s not a stretch to imagine where they will first be situated. Mr. Malone’s book is paving the way humans will see the future — and polar life.

As humans are driven to Arctic shores by climate calamity at lower latitudes over the next thousand years — perhaps sooner! –it’s a sure bet that the far north will be an ever busier place. Urban planners, get out your mukluks. Readers, use this far-seeing book as a home resource to help you to envision what life might very well be like for our ancestors, far far down “the road.” –Danny Bloom